The authors would like to thank Miriam Oh for her dedicated research
assistance, and Craig Murphy for his generous advice. Thanks are
also due to the Common LISP members who participated in our study,
to Jim Hollan who helped us locate the Common LISP archive, and
to Kent Pitman who provided helpful comments on an earlier version
of this paper. The research support of the Center for Coordination
Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is gratefully
acknowledged. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.

Table of Contents

This paper reports on an empirical investigation into the on-going
electronic interaction of a natural distributed group. Prior organizational
research into use of electronic media has focused primarily on
usage patterns and only occasionally on a few linguistic features,
while linguistics researchers have looked more closely at certain
technical aspects of language use in electronic communication.
Interested in a broader range of linguistic and textual features
that might be exhibited in the electronic mail medium, we conducted
an exploratory study of the electronic communication of a task-oriented
group over a 27-month period. Using qualitative and quantitative
techniques, we found that the electronic mail messages displayed
features normally associated with both speech and written discourse,
as well as features that seem new to the electronic medium. The
use of all three patterns was influenced by characteristics of
the medium, the group, and its task.

Since the introduction of electronic mail into organizations,
there has been much interest in the communication and organizational
changes that use of such a medium would occasion (Culnan and
Markus,
1987; Fulk and Steinfield, 1990). This interest has generated
many studies of the effects of electronic mail on communication
in organizations (Eveland and Bikson, 1988; Feldman, 1987; Finholt
and Sproull, 1990; Mackay, 1988; Markus, 1987; Rice 1984; Rice
and Love, 1987; Sproull and Kiesler, 1986). While most of these
have focused on usage patterns, some have also examined actual
messages generated in various settings.

Despite this interest in electronic mail, the organizational literature
has paid surprisingly little attention to the language and textual
features of electronic communication. A few researchers have
investigated
socio-emotional content (Rice and Love, 1987; Hiltz and Turoff,
1978) and uninhibited language or "flaming" in electronic
mail (Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, and McGuire, 1986; Sproull and
Kiesler, 1986); more recently, we have looked at linguistic formality
in electronic mail interaction as one element of genre (Orlikowski
and Yates, 1993). Still, other aspects of language usage (e.g.,
humor, discourse style, punctuation, etc.) have rarely been examined
by organizational researchers studying communication media.

Researchers rooted in linguistics and technical communication
have more closely examined some features of language usage in
electronic media. Some of these researchers (Murray, 1985, 1988;
Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore, 1991) have suggested that
computer-mediated
communication, particularly on-line, synchronous communication,
challenges the generally assumed (though increasingly
questioned--Biber,
1988) dichotomy between written and oral language. Ferrara, Brunner,
and Whittemore (1991) assert that the interactive written discourse
generated in a laboratory setting represents an emergent register
or variety of language that demonstrates linguistic characteristics
usually associated with both written language (e.g., formal language,
complex sentences, evidence of editing) and oral language (e.g.,
omission of unstressed pronouns and articles). Murray (1985:206),
studying synchronous electronic communication in a real organization,
also argues that "Computer conversation draws from features
of both written and oral discourse." She focuses on two
dichotomies that have been attributed to written versus oral language:
detachment versus personal involvement and integration versus
fragmentation. Wilkins (1991), in studying computer conferencing
of novice users previously unacquainted with each other, noted
their use of graphics to represent oral language features. She
suggests that this pattern contributed to the building of interpersonal
relations among the users.

We were interested in investigating linguistic and textual patterns
in the asynchronous electronic communication of a natural group
whose members were collaborating on a task over an extended period
of time. We felt that these patterns should reveal something about
the group's social interaction and their use of the electronic
medium. We were interested in a broader range of language patterns
than have been studied to date in the organizational literature,
and found the linguistics research on electronic communication
as it related to written and oral language intriguing. Because
of our social rather than linguistic orientation, we chose not
to adopt any one of the linguistics frameworks discussed above.
Rather, we elected to do an inductive study, drawing on previous
media, genre, and linguistic research only as it related to our
data itself.

We conducted an exploratory study of on-going electronic interaction
over a considerable period of time to capture a full range of
communication phenomena. In particular, we examined the electronic
transcripts of a distributed group of participants who, in a 27-month
period, communicated primarily via electronic mail to define a
standard for the LISP computer language. [1] We
found that the electronic
mail interaction of this group displayed features normally associated
with both speech and written discourse; however, our study revealed
dimensions of oral and written discourse that differ from those
of prior linguistic research, being rooted primarily in social,
task, and medium characteristics. Further, we also found aspects
of language use that appear to have emerged within the electronic
medium itself.

The following section describes the research methods that we followed
to conduct our study. We then discuss the findings in terms of
the three patterns of language use evident in our data, providing
illustrations and explanations for each. We conclude by suggesting
some implications of this exploratory work.

The group we studied consisted of computer language designers
who, during the 1970s, had worked with and developed various dialects
of the artificial intelligence language LISP. In 1981, they were
pressured by their funding agencies to come up with a standard
LISP language to ensure compatibility across different computers.
Over the next three years, these language designers worked on
producing such a standard, which came to be known as the Common
LISP (CL) language. Located at research laboratories distributed
throughout the U.S., these designers conducted almost all their
deliberations and negotiations via electronic mail transmitted
among sites on the ARPANET computer network. Electronic mail was
an obvious choice for this group: travel was expensive, time was
scarce, and they were all regular users of electronic mail already.

While a few hundred participants regularly read the messages,
most did not actively participate in the design process. Seventeen
frequent participants, generally key LISP designers with major
responsibilities for LISP implementations, formed the core of
the group. Because the LISP designer community was relatively
small, all of the major participants knew each other personally
from conferences or from having worked together. The 1353 messages
generated by this core group, which were archived at one of the
sites, constituted the primary data for our study.

We analyzed the message transcripts both qualitatively and
quantitatively.
First, we read large portions of the archive to become familiar
with its contents, and to see how the participants were using
electronic mail in their project. This textual analysis provided
the basis for devising a coding scheme and for interpreting the
subsequent quantitative results. The coding categories, developed
for investigating the evolution of genres of organizational
communication
(Yates and Orlikowski, 1992), covered three aspects of messages
-- purpose, structure, and language (see Orlikowski and Yates
(1993) for more details on the coding scheme). Only a subset of
linguistic and structural indicators are relevant for this study
(see Table 1).

: Definition, Reliability, and
Distribution of Coding Categories in Archive

(N = 1353)

Coding Categories

Reliability(Cohen's
[[kappa]])

N

%

Structural Characteristics:

Comment to an Individual

0.85

34

2.5%

Embedded Message

0.96

293

21.7%

Graphical Elements

1.0

13

1.0%

List

0.98

179

13.2%

Subheadings

0.85

64

4.7%

Subject Line

1.0

1262

93.3%

Word or Phrase Emphasis

0.94

205

15.2%

Language Characteristics:

Emphatic

0.84

322

23.8%

Humorous

0.80

144

10.6%

Informal

0.84

899

66.4%

0.8432223.8%Humorous

The messages were coded by a research assistant. To judge coder
reliability, one of the researchers independently coded a stratified
sample of messages selected to represent all coding categories.
Intercoder reliabilities were extremely high (Cohen's kappa
of 0.80 or above) for all the categories used in this study (see
Table 1).

Background information and perspectives for interpreting the messages
came from a series of face-to-face, two-phase, semi-structured
interviews we conducted with nine of the major participants in
the CL project. The interviews were conducted after preliminary
content analysis of the messages had been completed, allowing
us to draw on the results of this analysis during our interviews.
The first phase of the interview questioned the participants about
project history, group membership, roles, and social norms. The
second phase, a variant of the discourse-based interview (Odell,
Goswami, and Herrington, 1983) and customized to each participant,
elicited comments on the initial patterns observed in the message
archive. These interviews grounded our interpretation of the messages
and helped to confirm, elaborate, and explain the patterns we
detected.

Our qualitative and quantitative analysis of the messages revealed
evidence of attributes typically associated with both written
and oral discourse. In addition, we found some new textual features
that seemed to be occasioned by the electronic medium. Our results
and discussion are organized around these three patterns.

In an interview, one CL participant characterized the group's
electronic mail interaction in part as follows:

One thinks of having a conversation. It feels like
interaction--like speech--interactive and informal.

Indeed, the language, syntax, and punctuation of the CL messages
suggested informal conversation as well as the oral interaction
characteristic of meetings.

The informality of much of the word choice and syntax makes it
seem closer to casual speech than to paper-based genres such as
the memo or report. In the coding, we used as the criterion for
formality "language that would be acceptable in a typical
organizational memo or report." On this basis, informality
was quite prevalent in our sample, with 66.4% of all messages
being coded as informal. Informality evidenced itself both in
word choice and in syntax. For example, the following excerpt
from a message reveals informality of word choice:

By the time users learn to really groove on this
lexical stuff and use it a lot, we'll probably have your portable
super-compiler running for Vax, or maybe someone else's.

The words "groove" and "stuff" are clearly
informal and would more typically be used in speech than in memos
or reports. Likewise, the choice of "crock" in the
following message extract suggests the informality of the CL interaction:

I've always thought that &allow-other-keys
was a crock, and that unrecognized keywords should just be quietly
ignored.

Syntactic informality often took the form of incomplete sentences
and conversational cadences. For example, the phrase ending this
message extract is not a complete sentence:

While I am on this theme, I withdraw my earlier
suggestion
that we flush &allow-other-keywords. Temporary insanity, the
result of over-work.

Incomplete sentences were particularly common in messages that
reproduced and then responded to embedded pieces of previous
messages.
For example, in responding to embedded messages, participants
replied with phrases such as these:

Yes.

Certainly. That's why I sent in my previous
message

That's right; the manual ought to address
this point.

Such embedded messages relieved the writer of the task of paraphrasing
previous comments or summarizing previous arguments in responding
to them, thus allowing syntactically incomplete responses that
could have been spoken immediately after the original comment,
simulating the give and take of conversation. Embedded messages
were present in 21.7% of the CL messages, though the responses
to them did not always exhibit this conversational quality. Syntax
could also be combined with word choice and punctuation (an
inherently
written characteristic) to simulate oral communication, as in
the following quotation:

Hmm, I see. . . while REMAINDER[2]and MOD are different in general, they agree
on what is zero.

The informal, conversational rhythm created by the "Hmm"
and the ellipsis is clearly intended to evoke (although through
written means) spoken discourse. Similarly, "Sigh"
and "Gasp" were used occasionally to mimic vocalizations
or paralinguistic features (cf. Wilkins, 1991). For example, in
response to a proposal by a participant, another responded:

Sigh! Well, I suppose we could call these things
GENERAL-CHAR-1-D-ARRAYS, but that's pretty awful.

Another device used to mimic characteristics of speech is the
textual indication of emphasis on words or phrases (present in
15.2% of the messages). For example, participants often used capital
letters to create the sense of oral emphasis: "If an implementation
DOES support vectors ..." Alternatively, they used pairs
of hyphens or asterisks to indicate emphasis, as in: " .
. . since in most implementations it can"t be -quite- the
same as . . ." and: "I'm not sure that you
really do have *two* choices . . . ." Such emphasis might
be indicated in written text using underlining or italics, options
not yet supported by most protocols for exchanging electronic
mail, but formal written style tends to shun such highlighting
except in the case of key terms. In some cases, exclamation points
added this oral emphasis, as in a subject line "No No! Flush
it!!" All of these devices depend on the alphanumeric characters
of written text, but they are used to evoke the emphasis of speech.

Some linguistic and structural aspects of the electronic interaction
evoke oral interactions more typical of the meeting genre (Yates
and Orlikowski, 1992) than of casual conversation. While all of
the messages in the CL archive were sent to the entire group,
2.5% of these messages included comments addressed to a named
individual. For example, in a message responding to a proposal
by one individual, a participant observed:

Not everybody on the mailing list seems to agree
with your set here. I do, by the way, but clearly Rick does not.
I hope the official referee will figure out what to do about this.
Guy?

In his comment to Guy (the project's informal coordinator),
the originator of the message was, in effect, turning to Guy and
inviting his participation in the interaction. In another message,
a participant summarized the debate on two issues, then turned
the floor over to another participant by asking:

Scott, shall we have an auxiliary mini-ballot on
these two things?

Both these cases resemble a common occurrence in meetings: someone
holding the floor turns it over to another person or solicits
input from that person on a relevant point.

In other situations, comments to individuals do not specifically
invite their participation; rather they simply pass on information.
For example, a message covering several topics included the following
side comment to a specified individual:

Guy, Jane has figured out some good ways to do this
in Scribe.

Likewise, some asides within messages apologized to or thanked
a named participant, as in this comment appearing mid-way in a
long message:

Scott, I apologize for not reading your proposal
carefully enough. It does indeed answer all my questions.

Such comments clearly resemble those that occur in a face-to-face
meeting, when a speaker turns towards and briefly addresses one
of the individuals present, but without yielding the floor to
that person.

The comments to named individuals just discussed were sent to
all participants, and hence were public utterances within the
group's interaction. In addition to the public discussion,
our interviews revealed the existence of some private, back-channel
electronic communication between two or more individuals that
was not sent to the group as a whole. Such messages, like whispered
side conversations in a meeting, involved concerns or strategies
adopted by allies on particular issues. Thus the language of the
CL messages demonstrated several characteristics more typical
of oral communication in an organizational setting--casual conversation
or organized meetings.

While the patterns evident above would suggest that the CL messages
were informal, spontaneous, and conversational, our findings also
reveal characteristics more typical of written documents. Perhaps
the most obvious difference between synchronous oral discourse
and many types of written discourse is the ability to reflect
on, edit, and shape the message before sending it, a characteristic
abundantly evident in the CL messages. In interviews, several
of the participants commented on the care they took in composing
their messages and arguments:

When I compose an e-mail message, I generally re-read
it before sending it. Being able to edit messages is an important
part of e-mail systems.

E-mail is a precision tool. I use it very deliberately.
... E-mail is very different to other media, for example, there
is an archive. So I take great care with the messages I send.

E-mail is more convenient than face-to-face as you
don't have to respond right then, you can contemplate,
and respond at your own convenience.

The messages themselves, in both language and syntax, often show
evidence of careful composition into written text. One participant
told us that he "hand-crafted" his messages. Another
participant discussed his technique for editing his messages to
save his readers' time:

I expend more effort to decide how to make things
easier for my reader. I became very mindful of this during the
Common LISP project. If I spent one extra minute to save a reader
one minute, that was a saving of 200 to 1.

While careful composition does not preclude informal language,
and the absence of informal language does not guarantee it, we
might expect that more formal language would correlate with more
careful composing or editing of messages. Thus, it is worth noting
the absence of informal language in 33.6% of the messages. Some
of these more formal messages contain suggested wording for the
CL manual itself. For example, the following passage is from a
note with the subject line "revised BREAK writeup":

Compatibility note: Maclisp's BREAK takes two
optional
arguments. The first would be a string if Maclisp had strings.
The second is a boolean value specifying whether BREAK should
break or return immediately. In Common Lisp one makes a BREAK
conditional by putting it inside a conditional form such as WHEN
or UNLESS.

As we would expect from the subject line's signal that
the message is intended to be taken as part of a written (and
ultimately paper-based) document, the language here is characteristic
of formal written documents such as manuals. In another case,
a participant prefaces a message by saying,

Guy and Scott, here is a rambling essay on closures
and why I don't think we should say anything about EQLness of
closures in this edition: ...

In this opening, the writer compares his message to a genre of
written discourse, the essay. Although the structure of the message
as a whole is not so clear as in the manual example, its language
is clearly well thought out and edited, as this extract shows:

Consider "trivial" closures---for instance,
ones that appear in LABELS, and are simply used to define functions
and run them. A better characterization is that they are closures
that are never returned as values, are never (really) created
repeatedly in loops, and which never are passed as arguments to
non-lexically-apparent functions. For these I'd like to CONS them
once - at load time. Guy's example on page 75 of the Laser edition
is good, but even if the functions in the LABELS were to close
over some variables, these closures can be created once at load-time,
and their bindings could be updated on each entry to the appropriate
LAMBDA.

Another indication of a written pattern of discourse in many messages
is the use of formatting devices and related language primarily
or exclusively used in writing. Subheadings, a textual organizing
device which does not have a direct analogue in speech, appear
in 4.7% of the messages. For example, one message attempting to
lay out some design alternatives the group needed to consider
had the following series of subheads after its introduction:

TRANSITIVE VS. INTRANSITIVE
"INHERITANCE"

"COPY" VS. "POINTER" SEMANTICS
FOR IMPORTED SYMBOLS

PACKAGES AS A UNIT OF LOADING

PACKAGES AS A UNIT OF COMPILATION

These subheads, as well as the care shown in the development of
each section, are characteristic of written genres of communication
such as the report or memo. Another, somewhat less formal, message
used the following subheads to highlight the writer's reactions
to a previous proposal by another participant:

- Negative comments first:

- Negative comments not really related to the issue at hand:

- Minor positive comments:

- To get down to the point:

While these subheads are less formal than the first set, they
still use visual formatting to organize text in a way not possible
in conversation.

Similarly, 13.2% of the messages have lists. While brief oral
lists are possible through enumeration, they are much less common
than in writing. Often, as in the following passage, lists in
these messages seem to indicate the careful shaping of material
more common in written than in oral communication:

. . . I have three reasons for preferring the DO
form:

1. A lingering feeling the MAP forms are flaky and
are generally to be avoided, probably left over from the days
in which the binding issues were not worked out. So this is not
terribly rational, but it's still a pretty strong aversion with
me.

2. A lingering feeling that MAP forms are inherently less efficient,
since they require an extra function call. Of course, a sufficiently
wily compiler could eliminate this call, but I bet that the inefficiency
will be showing up in a lot of implementations for some time to
come.

3. Perhaps strongest: the observation that we have gone to DO-SYMBOL,
etc., and that we should try to use the same style everywhere.
(I hope that this will not lead to the counter-proposal that we
should go to MAP-forms everywhere, but I probably hope in vain.)

Here, in spite of the informality of words and phrases such as
"flaky" and "I bet," the passage is constructed
in a way that would be unlikely to occur orally. Moreover, the
line leading into the list includes a forward reference to the
three points that follow, a feature linguists call cataphora
and consider more characteristic of written than of oral language
(Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore, 1991).

Interviews highlighted another feature of written text available
in electronic mail and relied on by the CL participants: a record
of the interaction. Electronic mail provided, as one participant
noted, "a transcript at no effort." The message transcripts
were, as we have indicated above, archived electronically and
accessible to all interested parties in electronic or printed
form. This feature was critical to the participants. In fact,
one noted that in contrast to electronic mail, the telephone

...was not a useful medium [for the CL project] because
it has no record and we needed an archive.

In the introduction to the manual produced by the CL project,
the manual coordinator noted that the archive "proved invaluable
in the preparation of this manual" (Steele, 1984: xi).
Another participant explained more generally:

To document is very important to me. So often, I
have sent e-mail next door just to get a record.

One of the participants we interviewed, quoting another group
member, provided an eloquent testimonial to both the close relationship
of recording to written communication and the importance of the
record to the group:

Most interesting of the patterns we observed in the CL messages
are some that are apparently entirely new to electronic media,
though in many cases they would have been technically possible
in other (usually written) media. In some cases, the participants
used the visual representation of writing to achieve the spontaneity
and humor more characteristic of speech. For example, the graphic
of a sideways smiley face ":-)" was used to indicate
that something was to be taken as a joke. According to The
New Hacker's Dictionary (Raymond, 1991) and to our interviews,
one of the key participants in the CL group had introduced this
device a year or two earlier on an electronic bulletin board system.
It was used only rarely in this group (appearing in fact, in only
9 messages or 0.67% of the total), and was still new enough to
require explanation for some participants. When a participant
had reacted to an exchange of humorous proposals as if they were
serious, another participant sent a message explaining:

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so deadpan; I thought
surely everyone would recognize Skef's proposal as a joke. (The
last line of his message contained the glyph :-) which is a not-yet-widely
known joke indicator (it's a smiling face).)

Other similar types of graphic humor also appear in the messages.
For example, when one participant's proposal received extensive
comments (many critical) from other participants, the proposer
responded with the following message:

Gasp! . . . . . .

.

.

Thud!

A form of graphic humor depending on backwards writing is exhibited
in a message apologizing for transposing the user initials of
two participants:

The PARSE-INTEGER proposal was submitted by Bernie
(BSG), not by Glenn (GSB), though Glenn sent a message endorsing
the proposal. My apologies to Bernie and Glenn for the
confusion.

.lanimret ym htiw gnorw gnihtemos ro aixelsyd eb tsuM

ttocS --

All of these instances of graphic devices for humor were created
with standard alphanumeric characters, and thus could have been
used in typed documents. The sideways smiley face was never so
used, as far as is known. The second example is similar to devices
used in certain types of twentieth century poetry (e.g., that
of e.e. cummings), but is now being used in work-related
communication.
The backwards writing might appear in children's"
literature but is highly unlikely in paper-based organizational
communication. These graphic devices, like the graphic displays
noted by Wilkins (1991), take advantage of the visual nature of
electronic communication combined with the informality and humor
of oral interaction.

Another form of humor that appears in these electronic messages--one
based on typographical errors--also depends on the visual nature
of text but does not create images in the same way that graphical
devices do. For example, in one case a transposition of "obvious"
into "obviosu" drew a comment from another participant.
The originator of the error then responded with the following
message, under the subject line "Obviosu effect":

The Obviosu effect is the electromagnetic dual of
the Hall effect. It causes memory to be scrambled when you type
on your keyboard, for example. So if you try to delete a hash-table
entry currently given to the maphash function, it obviosuly clobbers
your LISP.

--Quux

A similar example occurred when, in response to a misspelling
of "appalled" as "apalled" by one participant,
another began his message,

Well, as long as we're being apalled (or even
appalled, for those of you who are into traditional spelling)
..."

Another participant picked up on this in a message with a subject
line "Apalled," punning on various computer terms:

A marvelous word, this. Perhaps Kent meant that
Common
LISP is in danger of being "APPLEd", that is, forced
into the Procrustean bed of an APPLE's memory size. This
danger can be avoided by making the language so large that it
cannot possiblt [sic] be shoehorned into an APPLE. However, I
think this is already the case without RESTART being added.

Or perhaps Common LISP is being "APL'd", but
better to blame that on REDUCE and MAP than on RESTART.

But most likely is that he simply wished to "applaud"
the RESTART form.

(Sorry, Kent, don't mean to tease, but it's wonderful
how this typo landed splat between four or five applicable words.)

--Quux

This use of typographical errors as the basis for humor, does
not, to our knowledge, appear in paper-based organizational
communication,
which is typically produced by skilled intermediaries such as
secretaries.

These two examples also demonstrate a discourse feature that would
not be likely to appear in either written or oral organizational
communication, although it has appeared in CB and ham radio
communication.
The originator of these two messages, who normally signed off
with his first name, used his alter ego "Quux" for
these humorous messages. In our interview with him, he indicated
that "I use the moniker Quux, or the Great Quux as an explicit
deadpan indicator that this is not to be taken seriously."
Others indicated that this individual was known in the broader
computer community for using the Quux persona when doing creative
work outside the Common LISP project as well as within it. Since
no one else in the group had such a well-known alter ego, the
fact that no one else in the group used this technique is probably
not surprising.

Another textual pattern that seems new to electronic communication
is what we might term subject line humor. Most of the messages
(93.3%) have a subject line, characteristic of written memos,
to allow the identification and retrieval of strands of the debate.
In general, subject lines were straightforward identifiers of
topics; however, occasionally the subject lines played an additional
role. For example, after announcing a deadline at midnight on
a certain day, the coordinator of the group then issued a message
indicating that the deadline had arrived. This message, sent at
one minute past midnight, had the following subject line:

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG
BONG BONG BONG
BONG BONG

mimicking a clock striking twelve. In a follow-up message, the
coordinator corrected a typographical error in the message itself,
adding the comment:

I was typing so fast I blew it, and still didn't
get the message out until 00:01. Sigh.

In this case, the timing of the message (also recorded in the
header) combined with the onomatopoeia of the subject line to
create humor of a sort that would not be likely to appear in any
written memo.

In other cases, subject line humor depended on the evolution of
the subject line from message to message in the same conversation.
Typically, a series of messages on a single topic just repeated
the original subject line. Yet, because the exchanges were rapid
and conversational in feel, participants sometimes played on these
subject lines as part of the discussion. For example, one series
of messages had subject lines progressing as follows:

Here is a good idea, I think

Here is a bad idea, I think.

Here is a terrible idea, I think

A bunch of lousy ideas

Here is a tired Quux, I think

Thus, participants are integrating the informal spontaneity of
oral discourse with the more traditional static nature of the
subject line in written memos.

Interestingly, the phenomenon of flaming attributed to electronic
communication by previous researchers (Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler,
and McGuire, 1986; Sproull and Kiesler, 1986) is less evident
in the task-oriented CL group than might be predicted on the basis
of this previous research. While 23.8% of the messages were coded
as emphatic, most of them were simply strong statements of agreement
or disagreement with the substance of another participant's position
or argument (e.g., "I strongly disagree" or "That's
definitely wrong.") rather than the emotional outbursts,
name-calling, exaggerated emphasis, inappropriate innuendoes or
sarcasm, and obscene language of flaming. In interviews, CL participants
cited two primary reasons for the relatively low level of flaming.
First, as one participant said,

Most of the people knew each other and had met before
we started. So there wasn't much flaming. Dealing with
faceless people promotes flaming and depersonalizing. Peer pressure
prompts people to tone down their messages. We had pressure to
write things in a less provocative tone.

Another participant noted that their personal relationships with
each other contributed to the use of emphatic but not inflammatory
language:

You had to watch your language as this crowd was
used to having intelligent arguments. It was strongly rhetorical.
We could do this because we knew each other and respected each
other so we were used to this style of conversation. People probably
flamed less here than in other groups.

Second, the task itself, a complex and highly controversial negotiation,
created an incentive towards restraint. Two participants commented:

The subject matter was important and it [the Common
LISP mailing list] had a wide distribution. This wasn't
idle chatter but we were trying to get the job done. So you didn't
want to disrupt the process, and you didn't want to discredit
yourself.

There was a reason to be polite. We had a job to
do.

These two factors--familiarity with other participants and task
demands--kept flaming at a relatively low level. In fact, one
participant explained to us his strategy for avoiding flaming:

I would sometimes write a message, wait an hour and
then take out some of my sarcasm before sending it off. . . .
But we couldn't have done it on the phone, say. I just
wouldn't have been able to hide my sarcasm in that medium.

Occasionally, however, spontaneous outbursts of frustration did
appear. As one participant said "We each had times when we
ran out of control." For example, the issue of whether
to retain the LOOP operator in Common LISP generated extensive
debate. Eventually one participant, in an apparently spontaneous
outburst, sent a message with the comment:

I am sick to death of knee-jerk anti-LOOPism and
I am beginning to irrationally regard it as a plot to disable
me as a programmer by excommunicating my useful tools.

This outburst was not allowed to pass without comment, however.
Another participant stepped in at this point, with what he later
described to us as a "voice of reason," rebuking the
spontaneous outburst and smoothing the waters:

it seems to me that expressions like "knee-jerk
anti-LOOPist" are highly unprofessional and have no place
in this discussion. they only serve to divide people into two
camps and do very little good. ... please, resist the urge to
do name-calling. with the general level of passion individuals
have on particular issues, we just can't afford to lose
track of that we're working together, not against each
other.

In a few cases, flames took a humorous tone. After a controversy
about the LISP function MEMBER, one critic said:

Don't take me too seriously. Remember that
my comment was simply on the general grounds that we should stick
as close to Lisp 1.5 as possible. There is no reason to pay any
more attention to my opinion on this issue than in the 1587 other
places where incompatibilities have been introduced over my protests.
Frankly, I am inclined to agree with the LISPM users who responded,
"after completing redesigning the language, why is everybody
so upset about MEMBER?" Reminds me of straining out gnats
while swallowing camels. Personally I don't want to swallow
either gnats or camels, and you can expect to hear protests from
me as a matter of principle whenever you deviate from Lisp 1.5.
But Common Lisp seems to be committed to swallowing 2 camels,
3 hippopotami, and assorted small alligators. (It is my opinion
that at this point the dreaded stacus spaghetticus dwimus could
enter and no one would even notice.)

This passage is clearly less spontaneous than the "knee-jerk
anti-LOOPist" remark. Moreover it tempers the flaming with
humor. Another way in which individuals attempted to control the
impact of their flaming was by identifying and bracketing such
passages (e.g., beginning with "#+FLAME-MODE '|"
and ending with "|"), before continuing in a more
reasonable tone.

The visual and linguistic playfulness of the electronic messages
and their occasional lack of inhibition both differ markedly from
the oral and written forms of discourse commonly found in
organizational
settings. The electronic medium seems to have provided an opportunity
for the evolution of new language and textual patterns.

In this paper we have investigated the linguistic and textual
patterns of electronic communication in an ongoing group of
participants
collaborating on a specific task. Similarly to Murray (1985, 1988)
and Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore (1991) in their studies of
synchronous computer-mediated communication, we found
characteristics
typical of both oral and written discourse in the asynchronous
electronic mail of an on-going, task-oriented group. However,
we did not limit ourselves to the linguistics frameworks adopted
by these researchers, but looked at a range of linguistic and
textual features that were present in the messages and that evoked
oral and written discourse. On the one hand, the messages reflected
the interactivity and spontaneity characteristic of oral discourse.
Specifically, we found that the syntax and word choice often evoked
conversational informality, emphasis, rhythm, and even vocalizations.
On the other hand, the messages evinced characteristics of written
discourse such as formal wording, careful composing and editing,
and textual formatting. More interestingly, we also found evidence
of patterns that seem more distinctively characteristic of electronic
interaction. The messages displayed graphic, typographical, and
subject line humor, patterns unlikely in written and oral discourse
in organizations.

All of the observed patterns reflect both the capabilities of
the medium and the characteristics of the group. The interactivity
characteristic of oral discourse is supported and encouraged by
the ability to engage in rapid exchanges and to respond to embedded
excerpts of previous messages. At the same time the asynchronous
nature of the medium and the editing capabilities of the participants'
electronic mail systems allowed reflection and crafting more
characteristic
of written discourse. Finally, the medium's ability to
support informal textual exchanges unmediated by secretaries (who
would be more likely to correct the typographical errors and insist
on serious subject lines) allowed participants to develop a playful
relationship with the text or, on occasion, to indulge in flaming.

The characteristics of the group as a social unit and of its task
also shaped the patterns of discourse observed in the messages.
The informal and conversational style of the interaction in part
reflected the fact that core participants in the project knew
each other personally and professionally. The careful crafting
and subsequent archiving of the messages noted as characteristic
of written communication were influenced by the complex, important,
and long-term nature of the group's task. The playfulness
with which the group took advantage of new electronic capabilities
evinces the participants' previous experience with electronic
mail and with their social community, as well as their knowledge
about computers in general. Flaming, noted in other contexts as
characteristic of electronic interaction, is limited in this set
of messages by the familiarity of the group members and the seriousness
of their task.

Our investigation of this body of electronic messages has distinguished
characteristics of both written and spoken discourse as well as
characteristics seemingly unique to electronic discourse. This
neat distinction is, however, only analytic; a given message might
reflect one, two, or all three of these patterns. Nevertheless,
this distinction illustrates the versatility of discourse styles
occurring in electronic communication, a versatility not yet fully
explored in organizational research into electronic media. Our
study also demonstrates that the context of interaction (including
characteristics of the individual users, their social community,
and their task demands) influences the particular combination
of linguistic and textual characteristics that will be expressed.
These findings, while limited to a single setting, suggest the
richness and complexity of human communication via new electronic
media and argue for more detailed, extensive, and contextual research
in this area.